This year’s London Film Festival will screen films from October 9 to 20. Tickets go on sale today at 10:00 for BFI Patrons, the 10th for BFI Members, and the 17th for the rest non-members.
Here’s what is programmed (click on the title to be taken to the corresponding festival page):
ぼくが生きてる、ふたつの世界 「Boku ga Ikiteru, Futatsu no Sekai」
Release Date: September 20th, 2024
Duration: 105 mins.
Director: Mipo O
Writer: Takehiko Minato (Screenplay), Dai Igarashi (Original Non-fiction Essay),
Starring: Ryo Yoshizawa, Akiko Oshidari, Akito Imai, Denden, Setsuko Karasuma,
Website Twitter: @FutatsunoSekai_
Mipo O, director of The Light Shines Only There (2014) and Being Good (2015), helms her first film in nine years and adapts an autobiographical essay by Dai Igarashi.
Synopsis: Dai was born to loving deaf parents in a rural town and has grown up acting as their interpreter. However, having parents who are different makes him stand out and he becomes embarrassed and blames his mother for his frustrations. Thus, at the age of 20, a newly-minted adult, he moves to Tokyo and pursues an independent life. After a while passes, and he has met more people as a magazine journalist, he returns home to his mother and a memory from the past comes to him unexpectedly…
Release Date: October 10th, 2024
Duration: 123 mins.
Director: Neo Sora
Writer: Neo Sora (Screenplay),
Starring: Yukito Hidaka, Hayato Kurihara, Makiko Watanabe, Shiro Sano, Ayumu Nakajima, Kilala Inori, Shina Peng, Pushim,
This one was previously screened earlier this month at Venice. Neo Sora has released a few documentaries about his father Ryuichi Sakamoto and one was at las year’s Venice Film Festival. This film will also be screened at the New York Film Festival.
Synopsis: The world is about to change. Kou and Yuta are rambunctious best friends who live in a near-future Tokyo where the threat of a catastrophic earthquake is ever present. Just before their high school graduation, they prank the principal of the school which leads him to install a surveillance system…
きみの色 「Kimi no Iro」
Release Date: August 30th, 2024
Duration: 100 mins
Director: Naoko Yamada
Writer: Reiko Yoshida (Screenplay),
Starring: Akari Takaishi (Kimi Sakunaga), Sayu Suzukawa (Totsuko Higurashi), Taisei Kido (Rui Kagehira), Aoi Yuuki (Shiho Nanakubo), Keiko Toda (Kimi’s Grandmother),
Animation Production: Science SARU
Website Twitter: @kiminoiro_movie ANN MAL
Director Naoko Yamada (A Silent Voice) is back with an this original animated film based on a screenplay by Reiko Yoshida (Violet Evergarden) and animated at Science Saru. Akari Takaishi of Baby Assassins and Perfect Nervous voices one of the characters.
Synopsis: Totsuko lives in Nagasaki City and can see people’s emotions as “colours”. She is careful not to darken the colours of her friends and family, and so she attends a mission school and tells lies to keep people happy. One day, Totsuko meets Kimi and Rui at an antique book store and finds two other sensitive souls, both of whom are trying to start a band. Totsuko joins them and soon feelings of friendship and even a hint of love emerge.
五香宮の猫 「Gokogu no Neko」
Release Date: N/A
Duration: 119 mins.
Director: Kazuhiro Soda
Writer: Akihito Izuhara, Ikuko Mizokamu (Screenplay),
Starring: N/A
This one first emerged at Berlinale 2024.
Synopsis: After Kazuhiro Soda and his wife Kiyoko Kashiwagi moved from New York to Ushimado, they encountered the local cat population that was centred at the Gokogu shrine and the people who surrounded the cats, some who cared for them, others who disliked them. Soda shot this film over the course of a bout a year and his wife, Kiyoko, became a participant. Participant-observation documentary about the connections between humanity, cats, and nature!
Release Date: N/A
Duration: 102 mins.
Director: Shiori Ito
Writer: Shiori Ito, Ema Ryan Yamazaki
Starring: Shiori Ito,
This has shaped up to be the doc that, those in the know about the form, rate very highly. It won the inaugural Human Rights Award at CPH: DOX where the jury stated that the film…
“…offers unique insight into an individual fight for womens’ rights in a country, and a world, that stigmatizes and denies rights to the survivors of sexual assault.”
It features editing and writing work from Ema Ryan Yamazaki, a documentarian who has won awards for films like Koshien and The Making of a Japanese.
Synopsis: In 2017, Shiori Ito was a trainee journalist meeting a powerful political journalist for a meal to discuss a job opportunity. During the meal she was drugged and later raped by the journalist. Despite filing a complaint with the police, they refused to investigate and the journalist used his political connections with Shinzo Abe to hinder the investigation. It wasn’t until 2019 that a court awarded Ito damages and it became a key moment in Japan as it shifted views on how rape and sexual assault are discussed while also kickstarting the #MeToo movement in the country. This documentary, based on her same-named bestselling journal, is a video diary that recorded her battle for justice. More on the case here.
卍(まんじ) 「Manji」
Release Date: July 25th, 1964
Duration: 90 mins.
Director: Yasuzu Masumura
Writer: Kaneto Shindo (Screenplay), Junichiro Tanizaki (Original Manga),
Starring: Ayako Wakao, Kyoko Kishida, Eiji Funakoshi, Yusuke Kawazu,
This film is the first cinematic adaptation of a Junichiro Tanizaki movie and it has a stellar cast with Ayako Wakao, who was director Yasuzo Masumura’s muse, working with him on this. She also appeared in his films Irezumi (1966) and Red Angel (1966). She also worked with Yuzo Kawashima on The Temple of Wild Geese (1962) and The Graceful Brute (1962) and with Kon Ichikawa on An Actor’s Revenge (1963).
Wakao is the object of affection for Kyoko Kishida (Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (1962), Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1962), Ichikawa’s Ten Dark Women (1961), Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (1961)), and Eiji Funakoshi who worked with the two leading ladies on a number of those films and also worked on the original adaptation of Fires on the Plain (1959).
Remade multiple times, including this year with a gender-flipped version. I cannot speak for those ones but this one is super claustrophobic and intense as it is mostly shot in interior locations and the production design closes in on the delirious thinking of the characters.
This first emerged at Venice 2024.
Synopsis: Love is like quicksand for four people in Manji, which starts when Sonoko, a bored married woman, goes to an art class and falls for a fellow student, the young and beautiful Mitsuko, whom she asks to be a life model. Their relationship becomes one of obsession that drags in their partners…
In the Animated Shorts for Younger Audiences section has a short from Japan.
あめだま 「Amedama」
Release Date: September 20th, 2024
Duration: 21 mins.
Director: Daisuke Nishio
Writer: Ichiro Takano (Screenplay), Baek Hee-na (Original Story),
Starring: Haruto Shima, Hiroshi Iwasaki, Kazuhiro Yamaji, Sakiko Uran, Ikkei Watanabe, Oi Kiko,
Animation Production: Toei Animation
This is based on Baek Hee-na, winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (the children’s book equivalent of a Nobel Laureate prize for literature) in 2020 for “Cloud Bread” and a popular writer. You can hear her words and see images from Amedama in this talk she took part in.
Synopsis: A loner named Dong Dong initially wanted to buy more marbles to play his solitary games with but he ended up getting magic sweets that lead to some startling developments.
A Japan-related title is in the A Stream of Echoes short film section.
File No. 2304 (Dir: A.S.M. Kobayashi, Canada-USA, 2024, 05 mins., Website, IMDB) looks at a family’s history of internment and dispossession through going to Canada’s National Archives and looking through records.
Here’s past coverage of the London Film Festival: